Lol.
Responded to the invasion with a training exercise nearby. I forgot what a strong military response Trump had, showed real strength. Putin must have been terrified.

An even bigger response than when the report on Malaysia flight 17 came out in 2018 proving Russian military used a Russian missile to shoot down a commercial airliner. Trump-*crickets*

One of my former cow-orkers, who grew up in Malaysia, told me that when he was young his father was walking through the woods and was hit in the head by a falling Brazil nut -- he came to hours later, and was wicked late for dinner. He described the fruit as having nuts like sectors of an orange.

Nice to see them in fact.

Try to stay on track. The USA isn't deemed racist or xenophobic because it has immigration laws, it's because those laws are based on pre-conceived notions and disproportionate paranoia regarding specific countries and (some would believe) countries with high populations of followers of Islam. Immigration laws exist to ensure those wanting to immigrate understand the requirements, and a process exists that in most cases treats folks fairly regardless of where they come from. As Donald Duck has singled out specific countries, thus establishing a priori that all the folks in those countries are bad asses, then yes, this is indeed xenophobia at best but not really racism as the countries on the list are (like the US) a mixed bag and Islam is not a race.

So, if you want to compare immigration policy that exists in the land of the free and the home of the brave, your comparison should be with countries like Syria, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen that all forbid (well, they used to ...) entry to folks from Israel (always getting the short shtick), Kuwait, Brunei, Kuwait, UAE, Saudi, Pakistan, Oman and Malaysia and there are a few others I can't remember. It's not policy. It's paranoia and xenophobia from The Most Powerful Man on Earth and the fuckwits that butter his toast.

Carry on.

Before this one there was an Indian one - https://youtu.be/F4va4Me4FFM - and another from, Malaysia maybe? - https://youtu.be/u7kwS3ZbvNQ

There might be a real one that inspired these, or it could just be a funny story that someone told. "I stole this tourist's wallet and then saw the CCTV camera turned towards me,...", "hah, funny story, hey lets film a version of this to get views."

Hmmm, alrighty then, let's see,

Why did/would the poster include and where did the poster derive the following, specifically, the link which is not included anywhere in the YouTube pages for the account holder or the video posting and how is that not a spamming?

Angry gamer smashes his monitor after taking a headshot in Counterstrike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) http://store.steampowered.com/app/730/


Additionally:
Details
For business inquiries: razerage4@gmail.com
Country: Malaysia


I respectfully submit that the ban motion be reinstated.

@gorillaman

The only thing I see failing completely is your absurd attempt at rationalizing your bigotry--more aptly labelled in this case by its proper name: Islamophobia. I don't for a second believe what I'm about to post will change your mind about Islam or Muslims in general but I do believe that this kind of bigotry needs to be called out when it rears its ugly head. And my, you went full ugly there, didn't you... comparing Muslims to rats and seriel killers? Classy.

Despite your protestations to the contrary, there are in fact Muslims who do not believe in God but for a variety of reasons (keeping peace with religious family members, maintaining a connection to their cultural heritage, networking, etc.) continue to attend services and identify as Muslims. This is true of many believers in all the major religions, including Christianity and Judaism.

You see, as much as you'd like Muslims to all be boogeymen coming to bring Sharia law down on the rest of world, anyone who has actually met and talked with a Muslim (and god-forbid actually visited one of the countries StukaFox listed) realizes that Muslims, like all people, are extremely diverse (again, despite your protestations to the contrary).

Indeed there are Sharia zealots. But there are also moderates and reformers and even liberal radicals. Mostly, though its just a lot of people trying to get on with their lives the best way they know how.

Now, I find most religious beliefs to be repugnant. However, I don't find the ideas expressed in the Koran to be much more repugnant than, say, the Bible. In fact, I'm less concerned about what is written in supposedly holy books and more concerned with how believers attempt to implement those ideas in reality. I do indeed find particular forms of this implementation, such as forcing women to wear a bhurka, disturbing (just as I find Christians' attacks on LGBT rights disturbing). It's important to note, though, that such practices are NOT universal. For example, in some Islamic countries like Malaysia it's enough to simply cover your hair with a colorful scarf.

On the other hand, other practices that you mentioned such as Female Genital Mutilation and virginity tests ARE NOT Islamic. FGM predates Islam and is still practiced in the locales where it originated (places such as Mali, for instance) that now happen to be Islamic majority areas. The Indonesian virginity tests as well do not stem from some universal commandment in Islam but from Indonesian culture which sees women as "the symbol of the nations moral guardians".

Again, I don't suppose any of this makes any difference to you. You want to see the world in black and white, us versus them, "rats" and "serial killers" versus you, the white knight who is just trying to save us all from our cultural relativistic blindness. And so the shades of grey I am describing to you will likely go overlooked. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but I suspect the reality is I'll receive some lengthy reply that can be distilled down to, "Islam bad, hur." Or perhaps, "All religions bad, but Islam worst, hur." To which I can only reply, that demonizing the practitioners of any particular religion is unlikely to bring about the reforms you seek.

BULLSHIT. *waits for the jesus bomb* Oh, it was bullshit. Funny. Freaking Penn, you dick. lol!!!

Anyway, his first statement aside, isn't this how legit atheists have always thought? And by that I mean, atheists who practice what they preach and love other humans, as every mammal should. Shitting on belief systems but NEVER NEVER hating the actual person? That's how I function.

I always imagined it was simply the projections of the insecure haters of atheists that projected this perception that we hate Muslims. I never understood how atheism could mean anything other than love. That's why I became an atheist in the frickin' first place, because I realized God isn't loving if he could send people to hell. And from there it simply followed logically towards the absence of God.

I have friends from Malaysia and Iran who clearly CLEARLY have Islamic backgrounds -- but they're badass Americans and beyond that they're human goddamnit -- and I love them as much as I love my Jewish, Atheist, and Christian friends. I can't say that they aren't Muslim, because I don't want to assume anything and I don't want them to be in trouble if they aren't. But yeah, I love all my friends.

And you know what, I love bobknight and that piss flavoured cotton candy Trump thing, even though they both project hate onto us for being liberal. Honestly, I love you bob, and we aren't terrorists and neither is every Muslim. I love you -- even though you support America's terrorists, the police. And I love the police, despite my dislike of SOME (well, maybe MOST) of their views about the world. <3

I'm impressed Unlike @newtboy, I don't automatically assume you're lying and feel compelled to do a bit more reading myself before discussing it further.

It's been a long time since I studied it at Uni, and even then we never studied the entire Koran (a one semester course would not have been sufficient for that).

There is, of course, some disagreement about what the hadiths say. The one that immediately springs to mind is "Seek knowledge even as far as China", and I'll quote the former prime minister of Malaysia here:{quote}A hadith says: “Seek knowledge even as far as China.” It was pointed out by detractors that this was just a saying of the Prophet and it was not a command from God. When they disagreed with a particular hadith, they were quick to discredit it and refused to acknowledge it as a source of Islamic teaching. But if they subscribed to it, then they would not cease to highlight it repeatedly, even if it’s authenticity is doubted. Surely seeking knowledge in China does not mean Islamic knowledge. During the Prophet’s period, China was also known to have deep knowledge in such fields as medicine, literature and paper, explosives and many others.{quote}

Certainly the early muslims were very keen on acquiring knowledge, and did indeed travel as far as China to do so (and brought the art of paper making back with them).

[author flagged as a spammer - redacted]

Just remember these are people from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, who likely do not understand the harm they're doing, but are simply doing what they can to feed their families. Those are some hard knock lives.

And then there's us -- the ignorant technocrats who only become outraged when our access to information catches up to us and teaches us that our viral desire for exotic pets has fueled a harmful trade.

It's just ignorance all around. Our ignorant desires and the ignorant workers our desires have employed. Is there even an evil boss/distributer in all of this? Or is it just ignorance at every single level?

Since you brought up unusual punishments, let's take stoning people for adultery (which exists in both the Koran and the Bible). When was the last time someone was stoned to death by a group in the U.S., U.K., Australia, or even Malaysia for adultery? Hundreds of millions of Muslims and Christians around the world seem perfectly fine ignoring that part of their holy texts. Just because something that we find distasteful today is written in the holy text doesn't automatically make the religion evil nor does it suddenly force the practioners to behave like savages.

You need to look at the specifics. Take a look at the countries where stoning actually does still occasionally happen and who actually carries it out: Iran, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. Invariably when it does occur it happens in rural areas where there are people who still actually live like it is the middle ages, with extreme poverty and little education to speak of (other than religious). Sure, the book gave them the idea but it wasn't the only factor in play and to ignore these other factors or the fact that honor killings are in fact common across a wide number of cultures with varying religious backgrounds (even the Romans did it) is what would be truly intellectually dishonest.

As for extremists--they exist in all religions including Christianity. It wasn't a mob of Muslims who attacked Charlie Hedbo--it was two deranged individuals. And while some Muslims might have applauded the attack others denounced it, such as the hunderds of thousands of Chechen protestors who who were upset with the cartoons but didn't think violence was the right response (see article here).

Again, it's a complex issue that can't be boiled down to "Islam = Good/Bad." Islam as practiced by ISIS or Boko Haram? Yeah, there's some dark shit going on there. Islam as practiced by average citizens in Kuala Lumpur or Boston? Not so much.

But again, moderate statements based on reason and facts are not what sell books, generate online clicks, or fill lecture halls to capacity.

Attacking the religious text is a strawman in my opinion.

There's all sorts of outrageous (by modern standards) stuff in the Bible, Koran, Talmud, and other major religious texts. How could there not be? They were written hundreds to thousands of years ago at a time when reading and writing was limited to the wealthy or elite (i.e. priest classes). Much of that stuff is outright ignored or at the very least acknowledged by deemed less important by practitioners of those religions in modern societies.

All literature is open to interpretation and this includes religious texts. The fact that there are tens of thousands of denominations of Christianity with differing opinions about what it means to be Christian and how to behave as one gives testament to this. While there aren't as many named denominations in Islam, if you actually look at how it is practiced locally in say urban Malaysia (i.e. no Bhurka for women) compared with rural Afghanistan (i.e. full body covering required) you can see there's huge diversity there as well.

So if you want to judge the religion, then you actually have to take the time to make an informed opinion by looking at who does what and why they do it. And when you do that, you tend to find that there's this complex inter-relationship between religious teachings, economics, politics, ethnicity, history and so on which make it difficult to assign full blame to any one "thing" such as religion. The female genital mutilation example I used above makes this pretty clear.

Sticking solely with criticising the religious text puts a critic on very unsure footing, as at the end of the day all the critic is really doing is criticizing a specific interpretation of the text (i.e. their own understanding). That's why, as I said, it's something of a strawman argument since you're really arguing against an interpretation you yourself have created.

It is much better, in my opinion, to look at how specific groups are interpreting and enacting the text, and then criticizing their actions (or the effects of their actions) in the event that there is a negative effect. But in doing so I think it quickly becomes apparent that those actions are almost always enacted locally as opposed to globally. In other words, they are the actions of a specific group of people in a specific place at a specific time who have been influenced by all the factors (history, economics, etc.) I mentioned above.

And when you reach that conclusion you realize you're not criticizing Islam anymore, you're criticizing one groups' interpretation and enactment of Islam in specific context.

On the other hand, if you ask which type of criticism gets you more views on TV or more headlines in newspapers...

Wasn't surprised to see "Malaysia" on the shirt, it's a very big sport over there.

Not surprised that it isn't well known as a competitive sport, there are plenty of obscure sports that are regionally popular but don't garner much attention on the world stage.

After an involved effort with Google image search.. I should have just checked the YouTube comments. (Ok. I've looked at it. Now what?) :-)

http://www.globaltimber.org.uk/graphs/malaysia.gif

went to 3 different Chinese New Years dinners this week. Lots of hot pot (aka steamboat). Earlier tonight was the first time we did Yu Sheng (description). It's not well known outside of Singapore & Malaysia, so it's not surprising they didn't mention it.